I give talks at meetups sometimes. Every time: I know what I want to say, so I outline the key points in a text file. Then I open Keynote and spend an hour dragging boxes, nudging alignment guides, picking fonts. Four slides that look okay but say nothing I couldn’t have written in plain text.

The tool turned “organize my thoughts” into a design project. Three tools, three formats, same thinking expressed three times — the text file, the slides, the blog post afterward.

The problem isn’t writing. It’s reformatting.

#Constraints, Not Canvas

A blank canvas — Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint — sounds like freedom. It’s a trap. It asks you to make design decisions before you’ve figured out what you want to say.

Markdown won’t let you do that. There are no alignment guides to nudge, no font menus to browse, no color pickers to agonize over. You write a heading, a few lines, maybe a code block. That’s a slide. If the idea is too big for that, it’s two slides. The format enforces focus — not by limiting what you can say, but by eliminating everything that isn’t about what you’re saying.

No design decisions. Only content and the idea.

Drop a markdown file in your decks/ folder. Separate slides with --- on a blank line. Same convention as Marp and reveal.js.

# Why Markdown Matters
 
Jane Smith — RenderConf 2026
 
---
 
## The Problem
 
We spend more time formatting than thinking.
 
---
 
## The Solution
 
Write once. Present anywhere.

FolderPress reads each slide’s content and picks the right layout. A slide with just a short sentence gets centered as a statement. Write a blockquote and it renders as a styled quote with attribution. Drop in a single image and it goes full-bleed. A title with a subtitle gets cover treatment. You don’t think about layouts — you write content and the presentation follows.

#Two Audiences, One File

The same file renders in two modes from the same URL.

#Browse Mode

By default, visitors see a scrollable list of slides — stacked vertically, each with its original formatting. It reads like a blog post. Browsable. Linkable. Indexable by search engines.

Someone who missed your talk can scroll through it like an article. Someone Googling the topic finds a real page, not an opaque embed.

#Present Mode

Switch to present mode and the same content fills the screen. Arrow keys to navigate. Present from any browser, on any device.

The details matter when you’re standing in front of an audience:

Progress bar. A ruler at the bottom shows exactly where you are in the deck. Major ticks mark slide transitions. Minor ticks mark incremental reveals — content that appears on click within the same slide. You always know whether your next click reveals more on the current slide or advances to the next one. No more getting caught off-guard, expecting another bullet point and landing on a completely different topic.

QR codes. Every slide has a QR code button linking to the deck. Presenting at a meetup and someone wants to follow along? They scan from their seat. The last slide ends with the QR code front and center — the most common question after any talk is “can you share the slides?” The answer is already on screen.

Code and math. Shiki-highlighted code blocks and KaTeX math render in both modes. Technical presentations just work.

Smart separators. --- sounds trivial, but: frontmatter delimiters aren’t slide breaks. Horizontal rules without surrounding blank lines aren’t slide breaks. --- inside fenced code blocks is code, not a separator. These edge cases are the difference between a feature you fight and one you trust.

#One Input, Many Outputs

Blog post, email newsletter, slide deck. Same activity — pen your thoughts — different delivery format. Write your thinking once, and it reaches both audiences: the person Googling your topic and the person sitting in the room.

Honestly, slide decks might not fit FolderPress long-term. It could become its own thing. But markdown’s constraints make presentations better, not worse — and the small details in present mode turned out well enough that I want to show them off.